Post by Deleted on Feb 5, 2014 18:43:56 GMT -6
||| EMERALD SEAL |||
#Name; Emerald Seal
#Age Group ; Adult
#Sex; Male
#Gender ; Stallion
#Species; Crystal Pony
#Cutie Mark ; A letter, sealed with an emerald.His parents would have felt very clever.
#Occupation ; Gardener-turned-courier.
#Powers and Abilities ; Since he was brought up in the gardens, of course, he’s trained himself to have a green hoof when it comes to taking care of plants, be they the tallest tree to the littlest flower. But his special talent is in his abilities as a deliverycolt; he’s good at getting something from one place to another. (Especially when he’s really not supposed to.)
#Physique ; Average build, if a little on the tall side. He's got good endurance, but obviously isn't built for anything too strenuous.
#Mane and fur color and style ; Mane and tail are medium-length and silky smooth, in varying tints and shades of green. Coat is teal-ish green and crystalline, take from that what you will.
#Eye color ; Greenish-bluish and super shiny.
#Other appearance details (optional) ; Like other Crystal Ponies, Emerald’s colors dull when he’s sad or upset and brighten when he’s happy or joyful. At his very best, he sparkles like a vampire getting glitterbombed at a discotheque.
#Personality ;
Emerald is an odd one. It's like if you took the stereotypical boy-next-door and locked him in the backyard for most of his life. He's calm, soft-spoken, polite, and acts like the very picture of a proper gentlecolt, albeit a painfully shy one. Kindness and manners are very important to him, and he tries as much as possible to be good to everyone—regardless of their past, present, attitude, or species. But that isn't to say he's a doormat. He knows well enough when he's being taken advantage of, and while he'll generally smile through it, he's still aware of when to fold his napkin and step away.
He's also got a neat streak a mile long. "A place for everything and everything in its place"—when he wears clothes, you better believe they're wrinkle-free, and his mane and tail are washed and trimmed just so. (After living most of your life mucking around in the dirt, you'd be using all the hygiene products you could get a hold of too.) He’s highly fond of organization, tidiness, and an orderly shelf of books, seeing as these were all things denied to him growing up in the Empire. The books in particular; he reads whatever he can get his hooves on, hungry to know more about how the world has changed.
However, this also means Emerald doesn't deal well with "incomplete" things—untrimmed hedges, messy tables, rumpled piles of clothing all bother the heck out of him, and he has the impulsive desire to "fix" what isn't "right". Again, because this is something that was beaten into his head; if things are disorderly, besides him, then he hasn’t done his job. Don't ever leave him alone with your half-finished puzzle if you want to get it done yourself, and if you need to shut him up for a few hours, just give him a Rubik's cube. He'll be working at it for hours until it's in its proper place.
He's not all shiny sweetness, though. Emerald has a knack for trouble, and sometimes goes seeking it out; he isn't quite a rebel without a cause, but he's gotten into enough situations to make you wonder. Part of is that he gets a thrill out of it, but the other part is that he’s got the idea in his head that what’s right and what’s allowed are often different things; so he has a predilection for breaking the rules, within reason. He would never want to cause harm, of course—but "No Trespassing" signs and locks don't mean a whole lot to him.
So while he can be patient in most circumstances, his sneaky streak can get the better of him. He's used to meeting more resistance than he really gets outside of the Sombra-run Empire; it comes naturally to him to tip-hoof around confrontations rather than face them straight on.
#History ;
Emerald was born shortly before his parents became slaves to King Sombra, and separated soon after the birth of his little sister. His recollections of his mother and father are fuzzy at best; he only remembers the tones of their voices, a song his mother used to sing, and that he has eyes the same color as his father's. Besides that, it's all a blur to him—he and his sister were both raised by others, for reasons unknown.
About as soon as he was old enough to work, he was put out tending the gardens around the castle. His sister was cleaning the castle indoors, and they never had any contact, although every so often he'd get to look inside and see her. He knew her name through the grapevine—Topaz—but never dared approach her while they were under Sombra's watch. That didn't keep him from sneaking a peek to check on her, though; he always had a knack for getting into odd nooks and crannies, and that led him to hear and observe more than your average foal of the gardens.
The harsh weather conditions around the Empire weren't kind to him, though. Since he spent so much time working outside he was often a weak, sickly child, and he found it hard in the winter to stay warm, even with the company of others. He was resourceful, though; he learned from his elders how to build and hide fires when there was no room for him, and he made himself useful so that there might more often be room. Usually, this usefulness came in the form of sneaking things along between those who couldn't contact each other normally.
He got good at it. But he was never flawless; one day in his later childhood, he was caught sneaking along a love note from a mare to her husband. Emerald was punished, and the note they found destroyed—but he was punished much further after refusing to give up the names of the ponies who asked him to deliver it. But as soon as he was left alone again, he retrieved the copy he had made letter and went straight back to the stallion (albeit much more carefully, and under cover of night). On handing it over, a small, glittering mark appeared on his flank; an envelope safely sealed in emerald.
As he grew older, he kept doing what came best to him. Putting his head down, working the soil, and using a careful routine to pass messages and small things between the slaves, whenever he could. Though he'd never have admitted it, he got a thrill from successful deliveries, and though he was often getting caught and punished, that just made his successes taste sweeter.
One day, though, everything changed. Two alicorns with glowing horns and majestic wings flew in; and a thousand years went by in a flash of brilliant yellow-and-blue magic.The Roleplayer's Corner
#Nickname ; Dizzy
#Age ; Twentyish
#Sex and Gender ; Lass; cisgender
#How did you find us? ; Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. And they’re always whispering your name. (Also, you can’t see them in the dark. Now they're just humming.)
#Sample RP ;Ms. Cloudy Quartz
186 Lapis Lane, Crystal Empire
c.o. Ms. Tin Tinker
The mailbag knocked against his side with each step. 148... 160... 18–ah! There it was, 186 Lapis Lane. It had a chest-high fence and a firm, unfortunately locked gate; beyond was a short lawn that ran up to some unhappy-looking bushes and shrubbery, and wide, half-curtained windows that gave away very little of the movement inside. So, Ms. Quartz was home... but the locked gate presented a problem. It was far too windy out to just leave it at her gate, and the mailbox was up by the door. Couldn't yell, of course, that would be rude.
Well. Nothing to be done about it, then. He pulled a little bobby pin from his mailbag's inner pocket, leaned down to the gate lock, and got to work. It was a simple one—older, obviously, and only four pins?—but after about five minutes, he clicked the last bit into place and the gate swung quietly open. There. Now, just to slip it under the door, perhaps, and... hm...
While he was walking up to the door, he got a closer look at the bushes. They weren't just unhappy... they were scraggly, browning, sick-looking things. Clearly not well tended, Ms. Quartz apparently just watered them once a week and was done with it.
...He shouldn't. He knew he shouldn't, and that she might catch him. But the hose was just over there, he could be in and out in two shakes of a donkey's tail. Fine, then—as long as it was quick and quiet.
It was tense. Tenser than he liked—it was one thing to sneak about in an unwatched yard, another when the occupant was actually home. But he kept his head low and stuck close to the bushes themselves. Once or twice he was positive somepony had come up to the windows and taken a look outside, and it must have been by sheer dint of fortune sometimes that he hadn't been spotted.
In the end, though, he managed to get through. It set him a bit off-schedule, and now he had dirt in his mane and all up his front legs... but it had been worth it. And the next time somepony had a delivery for Ms. Quartz, he'd be doing it again if she continued to ignore her potentially beautiful garden.
Rather than leave through the front gate, since she was surely paying more attention to the windows now, he found a little gap by the west wall and pried himself out into the next yard over.
...Where a little filly, no older than four, was staring at him. He froze, his rump still halfway under the fence. She didn't look alarmed as much as confused. ...Oops. Okay, think. Think quickly. There's always a way out, just—ah!
"187 Lapis Lane?" he asked. She nodded a little, not saying anything. Or blinking. He dug into his bag—shifted this and that aside, really needed to color code it down there—and pulled out a couple of letters, offering them out to her. His hooves got them muddy, but it was just junk mail anyway. "Mail delivery."
"Our maiwbox is at the fwont," she said, but took the letters anyway. He smiled.
"My apologies, miss, I'm new and a bit poor at directions. I will keep that in mind for next time. Have a good afternoon!"
And with that, he left from the front gate of 187 Lapis Lane and headed back to the main road at a brisk trot. Okay, what's next? 220 Crystal Piazza, oh good, that's on the way home...
